Dynastic History|Roskilde Cathedral — The Queen Who Was Moved Here in 1413

Margrete Valdemarsdatter died on 28 October 1412 aboard her ship in Flensburg fjord. She had asked to be buried at Sorø, in the abbey church that held her father's line, and she was buried there. Then she was moved. The Bishop of Roskilde, Peder Jensen Lodehat, who had served as her chancellor, took the body from the Sorø monks — the cathedral's own guidebook says almost by force — and in July 1413 she was interred again at Roskilde, with ceremony, by her foster son and successor Erik of Pomerania.

The move settled something. Erik had been crowned at Kalmar in June 1397 over the union of Denmark, Norway and Sweden that Margrete assembled; putting her here made this the burial church of the crown, and it stayed so. The cathedral's guide counts forty kings and queens thought to lie in it, with thirty-seven graves known for certain.

In 1423 Erik had a monument set behind the high altar, cut in Lübeck by Johannes Junge: an alabaster effigy on black limestone, much of its ornament since lost. Margrete had governed three kingdoms for a quarter of a century without ever taking the royal title, styling herself instead rightful heir and prince of Denmark's realm, and daughter of Valdemar king of the Danes.

The brick cathedral around her was begun in the late twelfth century, and is the first Gothic building in Scandinavia raised in brick; UNESCO dates the start to about 1170, the cathedral's own guide to about 1200. Adam of Bremen, writing a century after the event, put Harald Bluetooth's burial in the church at Roskilde, and a later tradition places the grave in one of the pillars. The guide notes it has never been found, and suggests a king of the next century, Sweyn Estridsen, may have started the story to raise the church's standing.

📸 Cover: The cathedral's brick flank with one of the royal burial chapels added to it, Väsk, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons